Saturday, November 22, 2014

Staunton, November 22 – Faced with
record capital flight and the worsening of economic conditions in Russia, Vladimir
Putin senses that a color revolution is approaching in Russia, an awareness
that is behind both his calls for a defense against it and his statements about
Russia’s victory over Napoleon 200 years ago, according to a Warsaw
commentator.

Not only did that bring the total
for capital flight from Russia so far this year to more than 100 billion US
dollars, Kublik says, but it prompted the Russian Central Bank to raise its
forecasts for capital fight over the next three years to nearly twice what it
had been predicting up to now.

In raising its forecasts, the Moscow
bank referred to “specific factors,” a euphemism for the crisis in Ukraine and
the introduction of Western sanctions that has followed. Kublik suggests that
this has gotten Putin’s attention and prompted him to make two declarations,
one which has attracted a great deal of attention and a second which has not.

In the first, his speech to the Russian
Security Council, Putin spoke openly about the dangers of a color revolution in
Russia, something that he said would happen not because of the feelings of the
Russian people whose expectations have been violated but because, as elsewhere,
of the foreign “interference” in and manipulation of Russia’s domestic affairs.

What
has happened in Georgia and Ukraine, Putin continued, is for Russia “a lesson
and a warning, and we are required to do everything necessary so that something
similar will never occur in Russia.”

In the second, his remarks at the dedication
of a statue to Tsar Alexander I on the occasion of the 200th
anniversary of the end of the war with Napoleon, the Kremlin leader said, “Victory
[in that conflict] was a global triumph of Russia,” one that “defined the fate
of Europe for a lengthy period.”

What Putin did not say but very
well may have been thinking about was that that Russian victory was followed by
the Decembrist uprising and its suppression and the heavy hand of Nicholas I
both inside the Russian Empire and as part of the repressive Holy Alliance
across Europe – until both those systems passed away with his death and the
first Crimean War.